Bill Was Here

On the news this morning I heard an interesting statistic: If Germans were allowed to vote in the American election, over 75 percent of them would vote for Barack Obama. Indeed, everyone I've met — from friends and colleagues to shopkeepers and random people in my travel — tells me to vote for Obama as soon as they discover that I am American.

But still, there's another American politician that the Europeans enjoy talking about. Not W of course. They get angry when they talk about him. They get excited when talking about Bill Clinton.

What's interesting is that I rarely hear about Bill's policies or political legacy. Instead everyone wants to point out where Clinton ate, drank, slept, and partied. I'm not sure how many times he traveled to Europe during his eight years in office. But it seems that everywhere I go, Bill Clinton was there too.

Bill Clinton was in Berlin. Yup. He made a speech at the Brandenburg Gate. But I also saw were he had lunch. Of course he visited London and Brussels, but do you know what hotels he slept in? He even visited the small German city of Aachen. Naturally he had a snack there too.

In Lisbon I saw the cafe where he was serenaded by one of the city's most famous Fado singers. He ate pizza on the same piazza as I did in Naples. I also know where he had pasta in Rome. There's even a story about a coffee shop in Amsterdam where he smoke some hash with Christopher Walken.

As a matter of fact, from the balcony of my apartment I can see the Petersburg Hotel, where he stayed while visiting Bonn.

Most recently, this trend continued in Dublin. The tour guide on the hop-on, hop-off bus pointed out a restaurant saying, "Clinton ate a steak there." Later in the weekend, one of the locals at Sheehan's Pub wanted to take us to a place where, "Clinton drank a pint."